Concept Identification as a Function of Cognitive Style, Complexity, and Training Procedures.

Davis, J. Kent

Two experiments studied the influence of an individual's cognitive style on concept identification. Subjects were high school males, classified into levels of cognitive style according to their performance on the Hidden Figures Test. For the first experiment, three non-overlapping groups of 30 each were required to classify figural patterns, which could vary along as many as seven bilingual dimensions, into four categories. Findings were that high analytic subjects made fewer errors than did middle analytic subjects who in turn made fewer errors than the low analytic; performance in terms of error-to-criterion was an increasing linear function of the complexity of the problem (p